By 1892, another twenty-seven national unions had affiliated, many of them formed by defectors from the Knights of Labor. Newcomers included the Boot and Shoe Workers International Union, the United Mine Workers, the National Union of Textile Workers, and the United Garment Workers. The textile, garment, and shoe unions all had substantial female membership. About a fifth of the United Mine Workers’ members in the coal fields were black men.
AFL headquarters lent verbal support to women’s organizing drives but seldom came through with much more. In May 1892, the Executive Council hired the Chicago bookbinder Mary Kenney as the Federation’s first general organizer of women. That summer she toured northeastern cities, establishing female locals of bookbinders and garment workers in New York City, Albany, and Troy, and making contact with interested women from a variety of trades in and around Boston. In October, however, the Executive Council abolished Kenney’s post. Several prolonged strikes by male unions had recently decimated AFL coffers, and now that every penny counted, most of the Council regarded outreach to women as an expendable luxury. In December 1893, the AFL hired a second woman organizer—the Boston typographer E. Frances Pitts—and she, too, was let go within a few months. A permanent post did not materialize until 1898, when Eva McDonald Valesh, former editor of a labor newspaper in Minneapolis-St. Paul, was hired into the dual job of union organizer and assistant editor of the AFL monthly, the American Federationist.
If outreach to women had a low priority, the AFL did generally respond to those who came knocking at its door. Women’s unions were often chartered as “federal labor unions”—locals that did not belong to a national union. By the late 1890s, all but a handful of the Federation’s national affiliates had amended their constitutions to allow for female membership; but a great many kept women out in other ways—through high initiation fees, for instance, or special examinations for female applicants. In the federal labor unions and in the nationals, nearly all of the young AFL’s women members were native-born whites or immigrants from northwestern Europe.
Male membership grew somewhat more diverse, thanks largely to the Executive Council’s early policies on that front. The Council hired male organizers fluent in Italian, Yiddish, Bohemian, Spanish, and other foreign languages and translated union literature into various tongues. The AFL convention of 1890 resolved to deny a charter to the National Association of Machinists, whose constitution included a whites-only clause. The following year, the Executive Council sponsored the establishment of a new group, the National Machinists’ Union, that “recognize[d] the equality of all men working at our trade, regardless of religion, race, or color.” Much the same thing happened in 1893, when AFL headquarters refused to charter the all-white Brotherhood of Boiler Makers and Iron Ship Builders and set up an alternate union that admitted black men.
Starting in 1891, the Executive Council employed black men as general organizers. The first was George Norton from the Marine Fireman’s Union in St. Louis; within a year he was joined by James Porter from the Car Drivers’ Union in New Orleans. In 1892, both men helped to lead strikes that transcended the color line. That spring, black workers on the St. Louis riverfront initiated a week-long walkout that soon spread to their white counterparts and ended with wage increases across the board. In late October, black and white workers on the New Orleans docks launched a joint strike that culminated in an interracial walkout of 25,000 workingmen from forty-nine different unions. For four days, November 7–10, everything from printing offices to electrical plants to construction sites shut down tight as employers tried in vain to divide and conquer. Finally, they agreed to negotiate, and the dock workers won their demands for shorter hours, higher wages, and overtime pay. As one local labor leader wrote to Samuel Gompers, the New Orleans strike was “the finest unification of Labor . . . ever had in this or any other city.”
The AFL’s commitment to unifying workingmen always had boundaries, however, and they grew more restrictive over the course of the 1890s. From the start, the Federation barred workers of Asian ancestry, and Gompers lobbied hard for extensions of the Chinese Exclusion Act when it came up for renewal in 1892 and again in 1902. By the latter year, AFL spokesmen were also calling for laws to limit immigration from eastern and southern Europe, and the Federation’s Executive Council no longer refused to charter national unions whose constitutions stipulated that only white workers could join. The policy on racially segregated locals had changed too. The Council had initially defined them as a necessary evil that would disappear over time; black and white locals would presumably merge once white workers were educated away from what Gompers called “the ridiculous attempt to draw the color line in our labor organizations.” But by 1900, AFL headquarters regarded segregated locals as a permanent arrangement—the best way to organize workers of color without “arousing bitterness” among whites.
From day one, moreover, the AFL’s basic organizing strategy undercut its capacity to promote labor solidarity irrespective of color, nationality, and sex. The stress on craft unionism, together with hefty dues and initiation fees, inevitably distanced the Federation from workers outside the skilled, relatively high-paying trades. A great many of those outsiders were native-born white men; but women, immigrants, and workers of color were all disproportionately confined to unskilled and semiskilled occupations, where craft unionism—not to mention expensive unionism—simply did not make sense.
Nor could the AFL strategy protect union craftsmen from assault by monopoly capitalists. Never was that more evident than when the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers squared off against the steel baron Andrew Carnegie in the summer and fall of 1892. The Amalgamated admitted only the most skilled steelworkers. At Carnegie’s mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, less than a quarter of the 3,800 employees belonged to the union, whose agreement with the company placed the skilled men at Homestead among the best paid workers in the land. Determined to expand his power and profits, Carnegie decided that when the Amalgamated’s contract expired on June 30, 1892, the Homestead mill would become a nonunion plant. To that end, he turned over the mill’s management to Henry Clay Frick, well known in western Pennsylvania for his hatred of unions and ruthless suppression of strikes.
As the Amalgamated’s contract neared expiration, Frick announced the company’s intention to cut union men’s wages by an average of 22 percent. Then, on May 30, he issued an ultimatum: if the men did not accept the new wage scale by June 24, the company would no longer recognize their union. When the Amalgamated held firm, he went to war, shutting down the mill on June 30 and hiring the Pinkerton Detective Agency to reopen it with scab labor.
Nearly all of Homestead’s 11,000 residents rallied behind the Amalgamated. Unskilled steelworkers—mostly Slavic immigrants—joined union members in picketing the mill, as did many housewives and schoolchildren. In the wee hours of July 6, about 300 armed Pinkertons tried to sneak into the plant, traveling on barges that silently pulled up to the company’s beach on the Monongahela River. But a patrol of workers had spotted the barges and sounded the alarm. As the Pinkertons landed, an angry crowd of Homesteaders streamed down to the beach, and both sides opened fire. The invaders surrendered after a daylong battle that killed seven workers and three Pinkertons.
When Governor Robert Pattison sent 8,000 militiamen to Homestead on July 12, the Amalgamated welcomed the intervention. A union spokesman declared, “On behalf of the Amalgamated Association I wish to say that after suffering an attack of illegal authority, we are glad to have the legal authority of the state here.” The militia had arrived at Frick’s request, however; it was there to safeguard the company, not the townspeople. By the end of the month, the mill was starting to produce steel with a force of scabs the Pinkerton Agency had recruited in Pittsburgh. Troops escorted them to work.
The criminal justice system came to Frick’s aid too. As the mill reopened, he orchestrated mass indictments of strike leaders on charges of murder, conspiracy, and treason (the “usurpa
tion of civil authority”). This campaign only gained momentum after July 23, when Frick was seriously wounded by Alexander Berkman, a young anarchist from New York who had tried to assassinate him. Homestead’s chief of police stepped up arrests of strikers on the pretext that local anarchists were “getting ready to carry out some gigantic schemes.” By October, 185 criminal indictments had been issued, with some men charged four and five times. No one was convicted, but the legal battles decimated the union’s strike fund.
In November, unskilled workers petitioned the Amalgamated for release from their pledge of support, and the union declared the strike over. The defeat shattered the Amalgamated, formerly one of the most powerful AFL affiliates. Workers at Carnegie mills in several other towns had walked out in sympathy with Homestead, and there, too, the Amalgamated lost union recognition. The union’s membership fell from 24,000 in 1891 to 8,000 in 1895. Mills owned by the Carnegie Steel Company—later sold to J.P. Morgan and renamed United States Steel—would remain union-free for two generations.
Two years later, troops and courts combined to put down a mass railroad strike led by a new industrial union, whose members came together regardless of skill. Craft organizations had done little for most railroad workers. Independent of the AFL, the five Railroad Brotherhoods (Engineers, Conductors, Firemen, Brakemen, and Switchmen) were all the more exclusive and prudential. They ignored semiskilled and unskilled employees, tried to drive African Americans out of the industry, and seldom honored one another’s strikes. Indeed, their leaders condemned strikes altogether. Working conditions and pay were among the worst in the country. Each year, one trainman out of every hundred was killed on the job and another ten injured; in 1890, only engineers and conductors averaged more than $350 in annual wages. In the fall of 1892 rank-and-file railroad workers met secretly in Chicago to plan “an organization built up of ‘all classes’ of R.R. men.” The American Railway Union (ARU) went public on June 20, 1893, its membership open to all white* railroad employees except superintendents and corporate officials, with a national initiation fee and yearly dues a dollar each.
Eugene Debs, editor of The Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, became the ARU’s president. After winning an eighteen-day strike against the Great Northern Railroad in April 1894, the union began to sign up 2,000 new members a day. By June it was the nation’s largest union, with 150,000 members in 425 lodges.
Among them were 4,000 workers who manufactured railroad passenger cars at the Pullman Palace Car Company complex in Pullman, Illinois, near Chicago. George Pullman ran a company town, keeping rents high while he reduced wages. When the ARU’s Pullman lodges went on strike on May 11, 1894, he closed the plants. In June, the strikers appealed to the ARU’s first national convention: “It is victory or death . . . to you we confide our cause . . . do not desert us as you hope not to be deserted.” The convention authorized a boycott; beginning June 26, no ARU member would work on any train that included Pullman cars. When the railroad companies refused to detach the cars, the boycott became a general railroad strike. Within three days, and despite opposition from the Railroad Brotherhoods, 150,000 strikers shut down eleven lines, to widespread sympathy fed by public resentment of the rail corporations.
Two days into the strike, U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney sought advice from Edwin Walker, counsel to the railroads’ General Managers’ Association. Walker recommended getting an injunction based on the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), a vaguely worded and rarely invoked federal law directed against monopolies involved in interstate trade. On July 2, citing damage to interstate commerce and criminal conspiracy to obstruct postal service, the federal district court in Chicago enjoined all interference with rail operations, including any attempt to persuade any railroad employee not to work. The next day President Grover Cleveland ordered federal troops to enforce the order. They arrived in Chicago on Independence Day, and riots broke out. Over the next few days, at least twenty-five civilians were killed, and the Illinois Central railroad yards went up in flames. Across the country, newspaper headlines reported “MOB BENT ON RUIN,” “ANARCHISTS ON WAY TO AMERICA FROM EUROPE,” and “ANARCHISTS AND SOCIALISTS SAID TO BE PLANNING THE DESTRUCTION AND LOOTING OF THE TREASURY.” Eugene Debs and other ARU officers were arrested July 10.
An emergency committee called for a general strike in Chicago the next day, but only 25,000 workers turned out. Many unions awaited the decision of an AFL executive conference, convened by Gompers at Chicago’s Briggs House hotel on July 12. It contributed $1,000 to a legal defense fund, but agreed only to help Debs make an offer to call off the boycott if his members could return to their jobs. With that, the strike collapsed. Rearrested on July 17, Debs and other strike leaders were later convicted of violating the federal injunction, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied their appeal. He served six months, fellow defendants three. By 1897, the ARU had all but disappeared; just two dozen delegates showed up at its national convention that June.
POPULISM AND RACISM
The 1893 crash and depression hurt farmers and small businessmen as well as wage workers, and resentment of monopoly control of government was widespread. The People’s Party—usually called the Populists—provided an opportunity to act. The party grew out of the Farmers’ Alliances, which had preached agrarian organization against monopoly since the late 1870s, when the movement was born in Texas. The Alliances had serious weaknesses: they merged the contrary interests of small farmers and large planters, neglected sharecroppers and tenant farmers, and excluded African Americans entirely. But the movement’s 1889 convention adopted a “St. Louis Program” that was bold and practical. It called for nationalizing the railroads, breaking up large landholding companies, abolishing national banks, instituting a graduated income tax, and creating federal “subtreasuries” that would lend money at nominal interest.
In 1890, Alliancemen entered electoral politics, gained control of many state governments in the South and Midwest, and won more than forty seats in Congress. At its first convention, held in Omaha, Nebraska, in July 1892, the Peoples’ Party expanded the Alliance program to include “bimetallism” (a plan to increase the money supply by supplementing federal gold reserves with silver) and, in a nod to organized labor, called also for a shorter workday and restrictions on immigration. In 1894, Populist candidates received 1.5 million votes, taking enough votes from Democrats to make the Republicans the majority party.
Samuel Gompers did not think much of the Populists, since they included employers. But their state governments were generally friendly to labor, and socialist trade unionists urged the AFL Executive Council to declare independence from the two-party system and endorse the Populist challenge. At the Federation’s national convention in Denver in December 1894, the delegates adopted most of the socialists’ program, but Gompers managed to defeat two crucial proposals, for social ownership of the means of production and for independent political action.
If the AFL stood back from the People’s Party, the surviving assemblies of the Knights of Labor did not. The Order had become a predominantly rural organization, its 75,000 members mostly in the West and the South. The Knights sent delegates to the Populist conventions in St. Louis and Omaha.
Unfortunately, the Knights could no longer bring cross-racial cooperation to the movement. Though the Order’s overall membership declined after Haymarket, its black membership increased; in mid-1887, the Knights had over 90,000 black members in the South, up from 60,000 a year earlier. That year 10,000 Knights—9,000 of them black—went on strike in Louisiana’s sugarcane fields. The strike was suppressed by lawmen and vigilante forces, and more than twenty-five 25 black workers were killed. The Order’s General Executive Board declined to assist the strikers. By 1894, with radicals like Frank Ferrell long gone, the Board had decided that the “negro problem” could be solved only by deportation. The southwestern Knights’ Mexican American membership had also surged in the late 1880s, especially in New Mexico. In 1888, Juan José Herrera—founder of Las
Gorras Blancas—was commissioned as a district organizer for the Order and helped start more than twenty local assemblies of Los Caballeros de Labor in San Miguel and neighboring counties. But these assemblies never developed a working relationship with New Mexico’s Anglo Knights and clashed repeatedly with the General Executive Board. When Herrera, his brother Pablo, and forty-five other Mexicanos were indicted for Las Gorras activities, neither the Board nor local Anglo Knights extended support. In 1891, Pablo Herrera (recently elected to New Mexico’s territorial legislature) was expelled from the Order for his Las Gorras connections.
Racial exclusion undermined the Populists in both western and southwestern states. The Herrera brothers led the establishment of a local Partido del Pueblo in New Mexico, but it never developed ties to the national People’s Party. In the South, a Colored Farmer’s Alliance had formed alongside the white movement, and many attempts were made to confederate or merge the two. White Populist leader Tom Watson argued for unity, telling Georgia farmers, “You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars you both.” But black activists could not count on white support. Farmers in the white Alliance broke a cottonpickers’ strike by members of the black Alliance in 1891; Ben Patterson, the strike’s thirty-year-old leader in Arkansas, was caught by a white posse and shot to death. Tom Watson went on to build a long political career as an advocate of the Jim Crow system—state laws requiring separation of the races and constitutional amendments restricting black men’s voting rights.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 18